Forms

Here are two forms, the first one is before and the second one is the one that I edited to make a little more fun! I grouped the information into three categories: Your Child, Parents, and Contact Information. This makes the form easier to look at and it looks like less of a burden to fill out. Different fonts and colors also enhance the overall look of the form.

Blurring out Faces

This is an example of a student collage I made. I blurred the faces on Gimp 2. I first opened up the picture that I wanted to use to blur the face, then I selected the ellipse select tool and circled around the face that I wanted to blur. Under the filters tab at the top of the page is a blur option. There is a list of options, click on pixelize. Gimp gives you the option to choose the pixel length and width. You can experiment with the numbers but I found that it's best to use between 10-20 pixels.

This is a very useful tool if you want to show off your work (that includes pictures of students) online. All you have to do is blur their faces and you can still get your idea/project across to your audience.

Magazine Cover

This is a magazine cover that I created on Photoshop. All you have to do is create a new project in Photoshop and make it 8 X 10 inches. The resolution I used was 300 pixels/inch. When you create this magazine cover, make sure to give every block of writing a separate layer. This will be very helpful for moving the words around and tweaking your project.

iSpy Picture

Here is an example of an iSpy page that I created in my Educational Technology class. There are a lot of educational uses for an iSpy page. It's a lot of fun to create and then students can work on their writing skills. Different levels of writers can be challenged with this task. Younger students can work on writing complete simple sentences. Older writers can work on compound sentences and more skilled writers can work on rhyming words. The teacher can even go one step further and create a book out of his/her students' pages.

Apple in Education

Schools are increasing the amount of technology in schools every day, and one way this is happening is by including apples in education. 

Students can read textbooks that come alive on their apple device. This includes interactive diagrams as well as videos. This creates more hands on learning than a textbook would never be able to provide. As textbooks can be dull and boring, apple books prove much more interesting to the student and keeps them on task. Students can still highlight text as they would in a normal textbook and the apple device is much lighter than carrying around several textbooks in their backpack.

Apple also allows you to create your own textbooks of which you can include pictures, microsoft word documents, diagrams, backgrounds, tables, charts, animations and so much more! You can read more about this by clicking on the iBooks Author Website on the homepage of the website.

For more information and a free download visit Apple in Education.

Paperless Educator

I read through The Paperless Classroom about becoming a paperless educator. I think that it is possible to become a paperless educator to an extent. You cannot avoid textbooks and workbooks, because lets face it, sometimes it is just easiest for the students to write out their work on paper and read from a textbook.

The best way to go about becoming a paperless classroom is to be organized. Every subject and assignment needs its own folder and sub-folders. You, the teacher, also need to understand how to work online assignments and group projects in order to explain to your students.

Once you are comfortable with these programs and have an organization system that works for you, you will be able to start getting your students involved. All of your students will need an e-mail address.

You can start out with Google docs. There are many different programs to use on Google docs.: email, blog, websites, questionnaires, documents, presentations, spreadsheet, forms, drawings and tables.

One really great way to go paperless would be instead of writing papers they could be done on a computer and submitted online. Instead of writing out multiple rough drafts and a final copy, students can type up their rough draft, submit it for peer/teacher editing, and then revise it (without having to rewrite the whole thing and using multiple pages of paper) and turn the paper in via e-mail or however you would like to have it turned into you.

Build Yourself Wild

This is from the website Build Yourself Wild. You can have students visit this website to create a self-portrait or cute monster. After students create their person you can have them write a paragraph or paper about themselves or their monster friend. This could be a fun activity at the beginning of the year to help you get to know your students.